Larry and Gloria Hedderman both feared they would never see each other alive again.

The Powell couple spent several hours Friday night and most of Saturday apart after a boating accident near the Horseshoe Bend Marina in Big Horn County. Gloria went into the water when their boat capsized in a sudden windstorm, and Larry had to scale the rocky cliffs nearby to find a perch for the night.

They could not see each other, could not hear anything in the wind. They spent an uneasy night, fearing the worst.

“I was pretty sure Larry had died,” Gloria said Monday. She plunged into the dark, cold water, trying to find shore.

“I knew I had to live,” Gloria said. “So, I did.”

“It was a tough time,” Larry said Monday. “Definitely a survival story.”

It started as a pleasant evening on the water. The well-known couple — owners of a successful realty firm in Powell, Larry a former Park County commissioner, Gloria a former Northwest College board member and Powell school board member — were boating in the Bighorn Canyon Recreation District.

They had arrived at Big Horn Lake in the late afternoon. Gloria said they planned to check on repair work done this summer on the main engine of their 18-foot Starcraft, which they have owned for years; her family had it before them.

They also wanted to test a used kicker motor, an auxiliary power source they added this year.

“We were just going to take a quick spin, make sure everything is working,” Gloria said.

They headed to Devil’s Canyon, landed the boat and had a picnic supper before they went to work on the kicker motor. After a bit, they decided to stop and head home; they could complete the project there.

They were returning to the marina — about a 20-minute boat ride — when they struck a large, submerged log around 7:15 p.m. The main motor was out of commission.

“There we were, disabled,” Larry said.

“Larry jerry-rigged the kicker motor,” Gloria said. “He’s very mechanical and finally figured it out.”

They slowly headed for shore, chugging along on a dark night, with no moon to offer rays of light on the black water while battling the wind. That short ride now promised to last more than two hours.

“We had just got to the main lake where the marina is about 10:30 p.m. It was a struggle,” she said. “The wind had come up, and the waves were really, really high.”

Then the kicker motor died. Larry worked hard to restart the two-cycle motor and limp the boat back to shore. They were within 100 or 200 yards of the main buoy light and en route to the docking area when the motor failed again after water swamped the boat.

“We were adrift,” Gloria said.

“The lake was nasty,” Larry said. “The wind spun us around.”

They drifted toward steep cliffs on the south side of lake, as the wind pushed their boat into the cliffs.

“We were at the mercy of the wind,” he said. “But we weren’t that worried. We thought we would come ashore, tie the boat up and wait until someone came along in the morning.”

But the wind-whipped waves pushed the boat backwards into a slender box canyon and slammed it into the cliffs. It started to take on water, Gloria said. They were trying to use their oars to keep the boat off the cliffs, but to no avail.

The boat turned on its side, and they were tossed out. Gloria feared being trapped under the boat, Larry said, and refused to join him alongside it.

“So I jumped and I swam out,” she said.

She last saw Larry on the boat as she floated into the darkness.

A night on a cliff

Larry gave up on the boat and climbed a cliff to perch on a slick, wet ledge 6 to 7 feet above the water, lodging their flashlight in his mouth as he made his way up.

“I scampered out of there, and I was on dry land,” Larry said.

It was a fairly large area, and after realizing he could not get out, he sat down and decided to endure the night as best he could.

“I was alive. I had enough to survive,” Larry said. “I’m a pretty calm person.”

He put a plastic life preserver close to his body, added a hoodie and waited. By around 7 a.m., with just a few minutes sleep, he decided to try to climb down but realized he was rim-rocked, with no way out other than back into the water.

The boat had completely capsized during the night. He fished out some life jackets and took a “pretty nasty” drink of water that had pooled on the life jacket. It had blended with boat fuel, but he was thirsty and hungry.

“I could see the marina. I ‘guesstimated’ it was probably a mile away,” he said. “They tell you it’s always a lot farther when you’re looking across water.”

But he knew he needed to go for help. The odds were, no one was coming, and he didn’t want to spend another night outside.

“I guess my best bet was, I had to swim for it,” he said. “I hadn’t seen Gloria for about 12 hours by now. I feared the worst.”

At 11 a.m., he jumped into the lake, wearing a life jacket, with a second one tied to his waist and legs.

“It was a tough swim,” Larry said. “The lake was nasty. I gulped a lot of water.”

He stayed close to the edge, walking atop rocks when he could, grabbing the cliffs when possible. Finally he got to an area where the cliffs receded to hills.

He could see the marina, and felt he could swim to shore and safety. But after 90 minutes in the water, his muscles were shaking and hypothermia was setting in. Larry said he wasn’t sure he could make it.

“All of a sudden, a boat pulled in front of me,” he said.

Dan Sell of Cody spotted him and launched a boat to pick him up. A second man aboard helped Sell pull Larry out of the water.

They sounded the alarm and the search was on for his wife, although “he was pretty sure I was gone,” Gloria said.

“I had to assume the worst,” Larry said. “They went and searched the lake, and they couldn’t find her. They weren’t finding much.”

‘I have to find a way out’

Gloria spent hours in the water. She was wearing a life jacket, but it was “broken,” she said.

“I had something to hang onto,” she said, her voice breaking as she relived the moment. “It just tossed me around, and every time I tried to go to shore, all I found was more cliffs.

“I just swam and swam and swam,” Gloria said. “Then I started to get hypothermia.”

She said she came upon more cliffs and was soon gasping for air. Just then, help floated past.

“I reached out and there was a log,” Gloria said. “I knew then I was going to live.”

She hung onto it and “a long time later,” the log carried her into a little cove. She still feared hypothermia in her soaking-wet clothes.

So she removed all of them and spent the night huddled and shivering on a little spit of dirt in the cove.

“It was an unseasonably warm fall evening,” Gloria said. “So I didn’t die. I sat through the night. In the morning, I knew I had to get out of there.

“I cannot spent another night out here,” she said. “I have to find a way out.”

The cliff walls were “just too steep,” so she knew she had to get back into the water. She spotted a little dam on the east end of the lake and saw there was an outhouse there. It would offer some protection, she reasoned, so she set out for it.

“I did not want to get into the water again, but I did,” Gloria said. “I knew Larry was gone ... I felt he was gone. A bunch of the flotsam had washed into my cove. A bunch of his personal things.”

As she swam, she thought of the swimming instructors who had helped her and Larry more than 50 years ago in Cody. She thanked Ursula Kepler and Bev Kurtz for teaching her so well.

She had got to the dam and rested for a while before deciding to try to hike out. She estimates she walked for five hours in “that vast desert. It’s huge. I thought I’d see something. I saw nobody. Not one soul.”

‘We’ve found your wife’

Larry said it was difficult to have any hope at this point.

Searchers had found her green jacket, a life preserver and some other clothing; it may have washed to shore, or she may have discarded it during a battle with hypothermia, which has been known to happen.

Larry, by this time, had started to return to Powell, where he faced the heart-rending assignment of calling their two daughters to tell them their mother was missing and quite probably drowned.

As he drove into Lovell, a police car swung around and hit its lights. A Forest Service vehicle pulled up, too. A man walked up to him.

“He said, ‘We’ve found your wife,’” Larry recalled, his voice breaking.

“I said, ‘Is she alive?’”

Larry paused on Monday, struggling to speak, as he explained what he learned at that moment.

“She was,” he finally said in a pinched voice.

Big Horn County Sheriff Ken Blackburn said things were looking grim when there was no sign of Gloria in the water or along the shore — until someone spotted a coat drying on a tree branch. It was too high to have been put there by waves, he said.

“We knew she was out of the water then,” Blackburn said.

A deputy finally spotted something moving 100 to 200 yards off the shore. It was Gloria, walking for help.

Deputy Darold Newman located her and raced to her location.

“He was just working so hard,” Gloria said. “He got up high and was scoping ... with his binoculars. He saw my pink shirt ... and came and saved me. And told me the good news that my husband was alive.”

Although Gloria was at first scheduled to go to a hospital, she asked Larry to come pick her up. By late afternoon, the Heddermans were reunited.

“Pretty amazing,” Gloria said of the first moment they saw each other.

The couple emerged tired, bruised and dehydrated, Blackburn said — and very happy to be reunited. Larry turned 64 on Sunday, the same age as Gloria, so they had even more reason to celebrate.

The sheriff said he was impressed by the efforts of the Big Horn County Search & Rescue unit, the National Park Service, the Big Horn County Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and his department. In addition, people who were in the area pitched in to help Saturday morning.

“Just an excellent job by the Park Service and everybody,” Blackburn said.

Gloria said she was hurting, but so glad to be alive.

“I am really sore, and really bruised and really scuffed up,” she said. “All of that is so minor compared to what might have been.”

Gloria said the experience changed one thing.

“We’re done with boating,” she said. Their boat is a total loss, and Larry said they don’t plan to buy another one.

But Gloria said that doesn’t mean she won’t spend time in the water.

“Well, swimming saved my life, so I’ll still do that,” she said.